* Posts by Hyper72

56 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2012

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Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

Hyper72

Re: Let's start a new fad

This type of semi witty reply about old fashioned switches comes up every single time smart-devices are mentioned but I see nothing wrong in convenience improvements, most of our houses are filled with convenience devices like potato peelers instead of knives.

The thing is, it has to be done right! Many of these smart devices could offer at least part of their functionality purely on the local LAN and shouldn't be bricked if the cloud goes down. I control all my devices from my phone, either directly from an app or via the open source Homebridge on an RPi (because I didn't want to buy a box) that interfaces with Apple Home - without needing cloud access at all.

It's nice being able to set temperatures from my bed and it's nice being able to switch wemo lights from my phone, especially because I'm quadriplegic.

Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer

Hyper72

Re: Why not sue Youtube too?

> Where have you been for the past 20 years?

Past 2000 years... Probably more.

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

Hyper72

Re: Suddenly, Advertising!

Disabling DoH on a network is mind boggingly trivial. If the admin doesn’t want to use an enterprise policy then can just use a Canary Domain on his DNS to return NXDOMAIN, Firefox checks this at startup and then doesn’t use DoH. Voila, local DNS with blacklists will continue to be used.

PiHole even has it implemented.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

Hyper72

Re: My Mantra

I agree. 2.4GHz was awful but since I changed to 5GHz some 10 years ago my connection have been rock solid. Over WiFi I get >50MB/s file transfers to/from my NAS (NAS is wired to the router), which is sufficient for my use-case. As I game a lot I'm often looking at latencies and out of the ~120ms ping I get to the game server, across the border far down in the states, only 1-2ms is due to my WiFi.

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Hyper72

Getting into Rust

Rust takes a bit longer than most languages to fully understand and code often takes longer to get to compile, especially in the beginning until you become more experienced. There will be some frustration in the beginning but push through it. However, it is my experience that once the code compiles it tends to have fewer runtime errors, especially of the hard to find memory related issues you might see normally in C or C++ and with multi-threaded code.

All the other goodness aside I really love Return and Option types, it's elegant and makes sure return values are never forgotten, they have to be ignored explicitly and it has to be coded from the outset instead of left till later (and forgotten). I've spent decades reviewing code full of return values being forgotten...

Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

Hyper72

Re: Buying Intel

The RdRand bug was fixed in a BIOS update that all motherboard manufacturers have made available.

Not a good look, Google: Pixel 4 mobes can be face-unlocked even if you're asleep... or dead?

Hyper72

Well, I've disabled "attention detection" on my iPhone so it doesn't require me to stare directly at it. I was discussing this on some forum or other. Turns out a lot of people don't or can't trust their own family while they're sleeping so they really enjoy that feature. Completely unexpected for me and a sad thing to hear really.

Generally this kind of infrared dot projection is actually extremely good and not at all "a pipe dream". It recognizes me with/without beard, hat and glasses only fails with sunglasses. It is also very very hard to cheat for other people, except twins.

Though for people fearing getting arrested by the FBI/CIA/KGB/NSA a long passphrase is the only way to go but that kind of people should be going through burner phones like nobody's business anyway.

Hongmeng, there's no need to feel down: It's patently obvious this is Huawei's homegrown OS

Hyper72

Re: Here at last!

I was working for a company called Symbian long before Android. We made a smartphone OS, based off PSion EPOC32 - and licensed it to Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, NTT-DOCMO, etc. It was in those days the term "smartphone" was coined in an attempt to expand the market for phones with bigger screens and lots of Internet connectivity.

Then Apple obviously upended things in 2007 with the iPhone/iOS and at around the same time a company called Android had been established. Android made an OS that was meant to create clones of Blackberry phones. Google bought Android and spent a year updating it to the concept Apple had put forth. Any manufacturer not doing that lost market share very quickly.

So saying "without Linux there would be no smartphone industry at all" is in fact completely wrong.

This move by Dropbox will reduce users' files to tiers: Rarely, regularly accessed data now kept separate

Hyper72

Re: Youve blown it - so long dropbox!

I'm lucky so far, I just need for phone, tablet and PC. In any case I can also recommend Cryptomator, to keep your data yours exclusively.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Hyper72

Re: Surely...

I don't quite know why your comment reminded me of this:

"``I can't cope with it,'' Zaphod said darkly, and sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first. He looked uncertainly at both of her and preferred the one on the right.

He poured a drink down his other throat with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second one to pull itself together. Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to and maybe a bit of a sing as well.

He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that, so he sent a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support."

Canadian woman fined for not holding escalator handrail finally reaches the top after 10 years

Hyper72

Re: Other escalator laws

Just to complete the picture and explain the safety risk: Many dogs get declawed or their paws shredded every year in escalators, which why the rule exists.

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Hyper72

Let not the truth get in the way of a good hatchet job

A very damaging article. In fact what you do is to boot into macOS Recovery and disable secure boot/signing. Then install and run Linux at your leisure.

In fact, very similar to how you would disable secure boot in BIOS on a Windows PC.

A computer file system shouldn't lose data, right? Tell that to Apple

Hyper72

New file system

Writing a reliable modern filesystem is hard. That Apple did so in just a few years and have rolled it out to millions of devices without any major disasters so far is very well done!

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Hyper72

NoScript

From the NoScript website: "2017-11-14: We're working hard to make NoScript for Quantum available to you as soon as possible, even later today if we're lucky enough, and definitely by the end of this week. "

For fanbois only? Face ID is turning punters off picking up an iPhone X

Hyper72

Re: Real data?

Well, Captain DaFt; FaceID requires an infrared camera and a dot projector that projects 30000 dots onto your face to create a 3D model (even in the dark) which is the handed over to a dual-core Neural engine and the authenticating secure enclave hardware that ensures the biometric data itself isn't leaked to the cloud, only authenticating tokens.

So, it does require extra hardware. Quite a lot.

Does it work well? I don't know, I haven't tried one, probably never will, let's see what people say after a few months. There was plenty of uproar when it was discovered by the chaos computer club that Touch ID could be bypassed using a time demanding process and sophisticated equipment.

I would suggest using bio-metrics for the average use case, just like we use key for our front door, but stick with a complex passphrase if afraid of the NSA/FBI/KGB/etc.

Canucks have beef with Soylent as to whether or not it's a real meal deal

Hyper72

Re: We'll stick to real food, thanks

Fellow bacon loving Canuck here, I do enjoy a good hearty meal and generally have eggs and meat/fish every day. However, when things are hectic at work I sometime enjoy a quick Soylent or the local competing Biolent which is a oatmeal based rather tasty drink.

Whenever these things are discussed people tend to forget that it doesn't have to cover your entire diet or that people can do whatever the heck they want and good for them.

Apple’s facial recognition: Well, it is more secure for the, er, sleeping user

Hyper72

Purpose

Well, Apple themselves mentioned at the keynote that biometric locks will never be perfect,- the only comment during the entire presentation that was plain honest rather than 100% upbeat super positive marketing droid drivel.

The purpose of this type of lock is the same as the door lock to your house, to create a reasonable barrier suitable for the common purpose. The average phone thief will not have access to multiple lidar scans of your face and 3D printers capable of making better face masks that those Hollywood masks Apple already tested against. Those average thieves just want to re-purpose the hardware, not steal your information from the phone because of the difficulty level involved.

If you require better security, feeling CIA is after you, you will instead disable biometric access and configure your phone to require a long password.

Terry Pratchett's unfinished works flattened by steamroller

Hyper72

Re: I'm touched by the weirdness of this request...

"Sister Mary headed through the night-time hospital with the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness safely in her arms. She found a bassinet and laid him down in it. He gurgled. She gave him a tickle."

-- The antichrist is born (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)

Italian F-35 facility rolls out its first STOVL stealth fighter

Hyper72

Re: There's so much here...

One does wonder if it turns out like with cars where you have to worry about which factory cranked it out. For example a VW made in Germany might be sorta OK but the ones made in Mexico can go all out Carrie on you.

Two words, Mozilla: SPEED! NOW! Quit fiddling and get serious

Hyper72

Improvements headed for Firefox.

Some details about what they're working on:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=an5abNFba4Q

Pluto's emitting X-rays, and NASA doesn't quite know how

Hyper72

Re: Obvious really

> Or a wormhole has blinked out of existence shortly after disgorging a cloaked attack fleet.

However, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Bitcoin cloud miners a '$20m Ponzi scheme – there was no cloud at all'

Hyper72

Re: re: Ad-Blocker is going back ON

Having bought a Raspberry Pi2 and wondering what to do with it I ended up setting it up as DHCP/DNS server with Dnsmasq and I installed PiHole on it so all ads on my wifi are imploded to a single transparent pixel.

Google spews out Alphabet. Alphabet gobbles Google

Hyper72

Resident Evil

The new name reminds me of the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil.

Blackhat hack trick wallops popular routers

Hyper72

DNS

I use a Raspberry pi with Dnsmasq as DHCP+DNS server. It connects to the external DNS via DNSCrypt. Cheap, effective and fun.

Also it's running a little setup called PiHole, to deal with ads.

Polygraph.com owner pleads guilty to helping others beat lie detector

Hyper72

Re: So, it has happened. Thinking is now a crime.

Hmmm, sounds to me like he encouraged them to lie while under oath. That's the crime.

Gaze upon the desirable Son of Alpha: Samsung Galaxy A5

Hyper72

Re: Unimpressive

Actually it it not about plastic vs. metal, it's about the whole construction as well as quality of materials (many types of plastic and metal). For example while some plastic phones are creaky, have gaps and have bits peeling off, even the back panel, others like the iPhone 5c have a well made polycarbonate body on a steel frame, making it very sturdy.

So you really have to judge each device on its own. Disregarding non issue click bait like bend-gate.

I just got a Samsung Galaxy S6 with a glass back, replacing an iPhone 4. I never drop my phones but if I was prone to that I'd probably not get the S6.

Keurig to drop coffee DRM after boss admits 'we were wrong'

Hyper72

Re: Honestly, what is wrong with an ordinary coffee pot?

I used to have an espresso machine and a bialetti; there was something special about the ritual of making a cup on that spluttering little thing.

So I would agree with you in general but then 6 years ago I broke my neck. As a quadriplegic I'm unable to handle these devices safely and was stuck with heating a cup of water in the microwave and add a semi foul (Nescafé) powder. I then discovered keurig, as long as somebody fills it with water I can put in a pod and cup and make real coffee any time.

So, I for one, admittedly a special case, enjoy my keurig to make coffee, cup noodles or just an easy cup of hot water for tea.

TL;DR: For things, like pod coffee or WeMo switches that may not make sense to some; there may be perfectly good use cases for others, as steady sales would suggest - and I still miss my bialetti ritual.

Hackable media box based on the Raspberry Pi compute module: Five Ninjas Slice

Hyper72

Pi 2

I bought a Pi 2, an MPEG2 license, a cheap box and an SD card. Installed OSMC and added DNSMasq and DNSCrypt.

So I thus got a very nice home theater box, it plays movies via SMB from a USB HDD connected to my router, accepts AirPlay content and serves DHCP/DNS to my LAN. On the backend it connects to a DNS of my choice using an encrypted connection.

Cheap but much happiness.

Nvidia U-turns on GTX 900M overclocking after gamer outrage

Hyper72

Re: Laptops

Sorry edge_e, English is not my first language. It seems "amble" was the wrong word. What I meant was that it has good cooling of the GPU with some headroom. I hope you understood.

The point I was trying to make was that while some laptops runs hot, others do not. Let people do what they want, whether they destroy their hardware or postpone upgrades.

Hyper72

Re: Laptops

You're quick to judge; not all laptops are equal. Mine has amble cooling and for years I've overclocked the 670m while monitoring and staying well within safe temperatures.

It allowed me to keep it a year longer before replacing it with a 965m MxM card that is plenty fast and doesn't need overclocking, for the game I play.

I'm not really fussed whether they allow oc or not, but it allowed me to save money...

MOST iPhone strokers SPURN iOS 8: iOS 7 'un-updatening' in 5...4...

Hyper72

I rolled my ipad 2 back to iOS 7 today, the old guy simply doesn't have enough RAM (512MB). The iPhone 4S works perfectly fine for me on iOS 8 though.

In any case my new Moto G 2nd gen was shipped today because I'd like a bigger screen but am fed up with expensive contracts.

In a month time or two I'll buy the next ipad, to be announced, retiring the iPad 2.

Why both iOS and Android? Because they both work well for me, they both have bugs, because I'm not a blind zealot either way and because I get whatever match my buying criteria.

iPad? More like iFAD: We reveal why Apple fell into IBM's arms

Hyper72

Re: the App Store paid out $20bn in revenues to app developers

Ah I remember the good old days where my shrink wrapped boxes of software were sold through retail stores that required 50% or more and reached a limited market. The first time I sold through an online distributor they took 40%.

Sales from my own website avoided this distribution channel cost but terribly few managed to find it. Ok I'm terrible at marketing, so my fault...

So I'm happy with the 30% that has pretty much become an industry standard now, it's lower than what was typical before Apple created their App Store. Of course we can always find exceptions but in the general picture...

Google, Microsoft to add remote KILL switch to phones

Hyper72

Re: For the record

The Americans are not smugly patting themselves on the back for having invented this feature; they merely mandate a preinstalled solution that allows a stolen phone to be locked in such a way that it can't even be re-flashed and thus reused elsewhere with a new sim. With many current Android solutions re-flashing is still possible and easy.

Could it be abused by the network? Sure, but the networks have always been able to block phones (though not brick) which is why some countries have a big export of stolen phones, with blacklisted IMEI, to e.g. Eastern Europe.

Bugger the jetpack, where's my 21st-century Psion?

Hyper72

Revo

When I joined Symbian in 2001 they gave me a Psion Revo. I loved it, coming from a Palm V and SONY Clie the keyboard was amazing and as with the Palm devices I spent much time trying to come up with some useful purpose for it in my life.

Apart from EBook reading it was not until I got the first useful Nokia smartphone, the 7650, later with a £1 per MB corporate data plan, that pocket devices became useful for me. EMail, ICQ during boring meetings...

Apple’s Mac turns 30: How Steve Jobs’ baby took its first steps

Hyper72

Re: Floppy Eject

Ejecting? Unmounting? As long as you're not Ejaculating it. Perhaps in Windows 8.2...

Seriously, what's with all this intolerance? I've used everything imaginable: DOS, TWM, FVWM, OS/2, Windows galore, OS X, GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, iOS, Android, etc. and I've just figured out how they work and happily gotten on with my business.

Only scary moment was when I feared MS BOB might be the future and some annoyance occurred when a certain ribbon managed to effectively hide all advanced functions, though it was fine for simple documents.

Sony's new PlayStation 4 and open source FreeBSD: The TRUTH

Hyper72

Re: Another win for open-source leechers

I always thought the same; FreeBSD makes more sense for Android.

However, it wasn't Google's choice. Let's not forget that Google bought Android when the decision to use Linux had already been made, they didn't create the OS.

DropBox puts locks on doors, hopes biz bods will buy the house

Hyper72

Encryption

I find Truecrypt a bit impractical for cloud storage. However, Dropbox also works fine with EncFS.

Most of my Dropbox data is not sensitive but I encrypt it all on principle. EncFS and Boxcryptor gives me access on Linux, Windows and iOS.

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Hyper72

Re: Give me WordPro

Yes, I miss Word Pro, it was an amazing update to Amipro. I wish LibreOffice would adopt those incredible right-click popups.

It felt like Word Pro was built around styles whereas in Word styles have always felt bolted-on.

Hey, out-of-work BlackBerry bods: How about a job at Motorola?

Hyper72

Dragging feet..

I wouldn't say they dragged their feet releasing BB10. I would challenge anyone to take an non-phone OS and adapt it for smartphones in just a few years. Even Google spent more than a year after the first iPhone to refactor their existing acquired Android phone OS from looking like a Blackberry to implementing the new smartphone concept put forward by Apple.

The difference is that clever Google immediately saw that what Apple had was the future and started moving that way, where everybody else were scoffing at it. This is where RIM and Nokia failed, by not copying immediately but waiting until they had lost the market.

Apple’s iOS 64-bit iUpgrade: Don't expect a 2x performance leap

Hyper72

64bit - thoughts.

Apple didn't claim the processor is up to 2x faster due to 64bit, it is certainly due to other architectural improvements and they hinted at that.

Users will get forward compability for 64bit only apps, even though it's not immediately obviously useful it extends device lifetime.

Address space layout randomization (ASLR) - much better on 64bit architectures.

Convergence with OSX codebase...

They can use the same processor in other devices that may require >4GB addressing (RAM and memory mapped devices). For example AppleTV.

'Beat the lie detectors' trainer sentenced to 8 months in jail

Hyper72

Technicality

I believe that technically he was not convicted for teaching how to beat the lie detector but for telling people to lie while under oath.

Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0

Hyper72

Re: Thanks for the memory

Mmhmm, when I got rid of my IBM PS/2 model 30 I got a Commodore PC with 5MB RAM.

And a Turbo button!

M&S shoppers make quarter of a million NFC payments a WEEK

Hyper72
Facepalm

Re: M & S considered "posh" and "high end"?

"As far as clothing goes, they all sell the same exact stuff, made in the exact same sweatshops. Anybody who thinks otherwise is deluded."

Jake; You obviously know nothing about sweatshops. My wife was a buyer of jeans from Chinese sweatshops and the way it works is that when ordering for example 5000 pairs you agree with the sweatshop on every detail; quality of fabrics (cheapest thread, thin fabric to durable more expensive options), type of stitching, brand and type of zip (noname cheap, lasts for a week or various other options of increasing quality, price and brand), etc..

Basically two companies can order completely different quality clothing from the same sweatshop. It all depends on what their budget and requirements are.

Apple designer Sir Jony Ive holding up iOS 7 development: Report

Hyper72

Re: Making a late project later

Very few people don't know about the mythical man month as its always being waved around triumphantly. The truth is that only the project teams within Apple know what's going on and most of those people are probably not idiots.

'Better than Adobe' Foxit PDF plugin hit by worse-than-Adobe 0-day

Hyper72
Thumb Up

"I use PDF-XChange Viewer from the rather creepily named Tracker Software."

Lightweight, fast and can unlock/edit and save edited forms. It's really excellent.

Crushing $1.17bn Marvell patent judgment could set record

Hyper72
Thumb Up

"It costs what the market will pay for it, and that's what it's worth."

Exactly! Ebooks are no different from any other product in this regard. People pay $80 for jeans that are manufactured for a couple of bucks, the value of a product to the end user is not related to the cost of creating, marketing and distributing it.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know how to use HTML5

Hyper72
Thumb Down

Re: Ads, Ads, Ads !!!!

"How would you block ads on an iPhone?"

Use one of the fine browsers that blocks ads.

Are we starting another off-topic infantile chimpanzee shit throwing contest?

The 30-year-old prank that became the first computer virus

Hyper72
Happy

Stoned

This reminds me of the first and only computer virus I've had - "Stoned". It was quite harmless though.

Google maps app is BACK on iPhones, fanbois spared death

Hyper72

Re: a couple of things

It also seems that everybody's forgotten that when Google Maps first came out the media was filled with horror stories about wrong directions.

No matter what mapping app we use, we have to use it intelligently.

I'm happy to have street view again though.

IBM insider: How I caught my wife while bug-hunting on OS/2

Hyper72
Thumb Down

Re: IBM Is Still Like This

I worked for a company doing this.

Me calling India team leader during the first project I managed:

Me: did you finish the module?

Him: Yes, it is all done!

Me: did you write the test code too?

Him: yes all done.

Me: did you test it?

Him: yes, testing is complete! We are ready for the next project.

Me: ok, very good, integrate it onto our production branch today and ill send you another work package.

Conversation a few days later:

Me: What happened? The main branch doesn't compile? Integration team is tearing me a new one!

Him: yes there was some minor compilation errors.

Me: but you said you'd run the test harness, what was the pass rate?

Him: yes, we successfully ran the tests! Pass rate was 0%

I learned so much working with Bangalore.

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