* Posts by Paul Martin

21 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2007

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Paul Martin

Ah but can they prove the beer is flat?

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Paul Martin

Careful what you wish for

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/mueller-encrypted-messaging/

Further, the Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated-including some associated with the Trump Campaign — deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records. In such cases, the Office was not able to corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.

-- The Mueller Report

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Paul Martin

Re: Any Welsh scholars out there able to shed any light?

I think you'll find the answer in this article.

Take the bus... to get some new cables: Raspberry Pi 4s are a bit picky about USB-Cs

Paul Martin

Actually, the best USB A to USB C cables I've had in recent years are the ones that were on sale in Lidl a month or two back. Most adaptors fail where the cable meets the plugs. The hard plastic "strain relief" on most Amazon-sourced cables doesn't work for that purpose. The Lidl ones have a rubber strain relief with some give and hence are much kinder to the cable.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Paul Martin

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

Yes, but the lawn mowing career didn't work out.

FBI warns of SIM-swap scams, IBM finds holes in visitor software, 13-year-old girl charged over JavaScript prank...

Paul Martin

993/tcp = IMAPS, used by most mail clients for IMAP over SSL.

Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

Paul Martin

Frank King? Oh my! That takes me back.

WriteString("Wake Up!");

It's 2019, and a PNG file can pwn your Android smartphone or tablet: Patch me if you can

Paul Martin

Re: Great

Google Nexus 5X stopped getting security updates after December 2018.

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

Paul Martin

Re: A hint for all you jr. sysadmins out there ...

'ear all, see all, say nowt.

Eat all, sup all, pay nowt.

And if tha' ever does owt for nowt

Do it for thi'sen.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Paul Martin

Re: Google are crafty

Google will counter that by using DNS over HTTPS (RFC8484) or DNS over TLS (RFC7858) instead.

UK.gov to roll out voter ID trials in 2019 local elections

Paul Martin

Re: I am well and truly fucked if they want ID

It's also possible for someone (eg. under police protection) to be an anonymous voter, listed only as a number on the electoral roll. No name, no address: just a number.

BT: We're stocking warehouses with kit ahead of Brexit to avoid shortages

Paul Martin

Re: A timely reminder...

The Bushmills distillery also bottles a proportion of the spirits produced at the Jameson Distillery in Co. Cork. They'll lose that work if there's a hard border.

Hot NAND: Samsung wheels out 30TB SSD monster

Paul Martin

I wonder how they're squeezing 2.1GB/s through a 12Gb/s (1.5GB/s) interface.

Russian-monitoring Shetlands radar station was nearly sold off

Paul Martin
Headmaster

Unst

"...the island of Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands..."

It's certainly the most northerly inhabited island now that the Muckle Flugga lighthouse is automatic. The most northerly is, IIRC, the tiny islet of Out Stack.

Microsoft can't tell North from South on Bing Maps

Paul Martin

Google's Happy Valley

Don't forget that at between Todmorden and Hebden Bridge, Google have a place called "Great Britain".

EE fails to apologise for HUGE T-Mobile outage that hit Brits on Friday

Paul Martin

Transproxy failure

The problem only affected web traffic (http and https). Other protocols (if not already filtered by T-Mobile) were not affected. The problem was logically then at T-Mobile's bandwidth-reducing (by reducing image quality) and censoring (and, presumably, government mandated logging) transparent proxy server farm. This explains why VPN and encrypted email connections still worked.

Mozilla downplays risk from unpatched flaw

Paul Martin

Misdirection?

The big security problem with 3.5 is not that but with the JIT Java compiler.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/jitter-bug

Asus keyboard PC due May. Or maybe June

Paul Martin

Full circle

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, most home microcomputers had the keyboard integrated into the processor box. Now they're going to integrate the processor into the keyboard. Will it have an interface for a cassette tape recorder?

Gordo returns to website in crisis

Paul Martin
Boffin

weekus horribilis!?

To be picky, "hebdomas horribilis", surely?

Two UK web hosts go down

Paul Martin

Easynet's Fault Details

"We are having connectivity problem across our network this will result connection problems for our customer. Our engineers are investigating."

Brian May going for astronomy PhD

Paul Martin

Makes the rockin' world go round...

Iliad has a comment:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070803